


For Better or Worse

by uncreatedlight



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-11 11:48:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15971696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uncreatedlight/pseuds/uncreatedlight
Summary: Happy endings are what you make them.





	For Better or Worse

It wasn’t so much that she had been lying as it was that she hadn’t been telling the truth. But when it came to Cora, leaving out one aspect of her life was tantamount to a betrayal. Couple that with the subject of the lie, and the result was a tragedy that she should have known was inevitable. 

She’d had the audacity to hope, and she’d paid the price.

It was the death of hope as much as it was the death of the stable boy that broke her. The physical action may have been Cora reaching into her lover’s chest and crushing the heart that resided therein. That alone may have been a thing she could mourn and accept. But Cora’s domineering will, her insistence that she follow the rigid plan laid for her, these things made the death of her love a constant agony, because ultimately it was her own fault for falling in the first place. She knew what her mother was capable of. Maybe she didn’t quite understand the extreme violence she was willing to embrace in favor of seeing her daughter become queen. But she knew Cora was harsh, that her idea of right and good were twisted by hatred and self-importance and dark magic. So when she saw Daniel fall unmoving to the dirt floor of the stable, when the terrible reality of what love had cost her set in, hope died that night for Regina. And with hope, so her willingness to love. It’s what would drive her to hate Snow, to take out her fury and frustration on the nameless folk whose lives meant so little. To kill her own father. Because how could she be hurt again if she loved no one?

She knew at her core that Snow, childish and naïve, was not fully culpable for the death. The blame lay with her own foolishness, her pitiable attempt to find happiness outside of her mother’s plan. And in that foolhardy recklessness she’d cost another person their life.

This understanding shaped her into the monster that was the Evil Queen. She was angry and wounded, and she lay all that anger on herself and out of necessity, her stepdaughter. In her mind neither of them deserved happiness.

The curse was an attempt to start again. Even in her bitter cage Regina knew that too many people had died because of her hatred. With a new beginning she could seal away the hurt and become the wise and benevolent ruler her father had wanted her to become. She could punish Snow, take pleasure in the girl’s eternal, unwitting loneliness. This satisfied her need for some kind of vengeance, but also alleviated the profound self-loathing that had grown steadily since the day Cora killed Daniel.

Who could have guessed that the curse would be her undoing? By taking away her own magic, separating herself from the land where she’d fallen into pieces and become a bitter creature, Regina unwittingly found not only the peace of mind she sought, but also something she’d sworn she’d never have again: love.

The love of a small abandoned boy, who grew up so willful and imaginative. Who had such dreams, who looked at Storybrooke and saw something in its people that Regina had tried to smother. And through him she found love in other places too. In the stepchild she’d learned to hate, in her too-pure prince. In the people who once feared her. In herself.

And in Emma.

Of all places, of all people, Emma was the last she would have chosen. That green fairy had pointed her in the direction of a man with a lion tattoo on his forearm. And sure she hadn’t pursued him, but in all the world he made the most logical sense. Not Emma. Not the daughter of her worst enemy, the mother of her son. The day she arrived in Storybrooke, Regina knew some deep magic had been activated. Alarming, since magic was not said to exist in this world, not in the same way as in the enchanted forest. But this magic was part of the curse itself—and something much older, a prophecy decades in the making, that tangled up her fate with Snow’s, and Rumplestiltskin…and Emma.  
She didn’t know right away. She couldn’t have. What she felt for Emma in those first days wasn’t love. It was hatred and fear. Fear that her peace, however based on falsehood it may be, was ending. That she’d lose Henry. That her people would remember and once again she would be forced into the mantle of the Evil Queen. After almost 30 years of mundane, undramatic living she was terrified of losing that stability. 

Emma came into town, into her life, like a blazing fire. The red jacket was well suited to her, for she was like a small and devastating flame set to the dried bones of a sleeping forest.

The day Regina watched her stalk angrily onto her property and with a chainsaw cut down her apple tree, that fear shifted to something else. A new and confusing feeling that Regina both dreaded and desperately craved. She fought it as long as she could, but raising Henry as her own had opened her heart. She’d become weak, no longer capable of chasing away love. 

The day Emma finally kissed her, mere seconds before Pan’s curse set and Storybrooke was spirited away to the enchanted forest, there had been too much at stake and too little time to process. With Emma pressed solid and true and warm against her, there had been only the surprise, the heat, the intensity of the moment and awareness of how temporary it was. They were never supposed to see each other again. Henry and Emma would have their happy life in New York City, and Regina would return home with her people to take on the next adventure. 

But then they came back to Storybrooke, and there Emma was again, blazing into her life unapologetically to save the day. 

Regina finally understood that everything had led to this reality. That right and good were not only an action or choice, but a person. That after decades of lingering in pain over the death of the first person she loved, the boy who taught her to ride with confidence and showed her that life existed outside of her mother, she had learned to love again.  
And of all people it had to be Emma, the product of true love herself, and the direct result of Regina’s spiteful pursuit of Snow’s misery. It was messy and unexpected and almost comically ironic. 

She mused over these things sometimes, in the quiet moments between crises and adventure. When Zelena invited her over for drinks by the fire, sharing stories from the time before their second chances. She thought about the irony of fate as she kissed Emma’s blond gold hair, curled up with her under the sheets on lazy afternoons. 

It was bewildering to think back on the person she used to be, the darkness her heart once held compared to the love she had in her life now. When she told Emma this, Emma smiled and kissed her gently, and Regina remembered that she wasn’t the only one who’d gotten a second chance, that she was that person for Emma. And this realization, that she’d traversed lifetimes and worlds to be another person’s healing, humbled and awed her. Because this wasn’t true love shown to her by a rebellious fairy. It was a future she made for herself, a family she fought to save. 

Loving Emma wasn’t the end goal, it was the natural result of years fighting and failing and getting knocked down and repenting for her transgressions. Loving Emma—being loved by Emma—wasn’t just fate or a happy ending orchestrated by a writer with a magical pen. It was a choice she made, and one she would continue to make every day, no matter what trial they faced or what evil threatened them. 

For better or worse, so they said.


End file.
